A eulogy for all Jacobins

PM Carpenter

I approached the Jacobin’s analysis of Francesca Hong’s primary loss with considerable trepidation. Although my politics are pragmatically center-left, in a conceptual long game they’re largely compatible with the magazine’s North Star of democratic socialism. Thus I feared columnist Paul Heideman’s “Five Takeways From Francesca Hong’s Near-Win” (not “loss”) would begin with a crackup and finish in an analytical train wreck.

Q.E.D.

The enumerated lines, including italics, are Heideman’s.

1. The polls were wrong.

More likely, the assertion is wrong. Marquette Law School’s July survey showed the broadest spread — Hong leading David Crowley by an astonishing 31 points — yet, as I noted in an Election-eve post, Marquette’s poll also found that 34% of respondents were undecided.

To a pol in the lead, that contingent can be a killer. Ask Hillary Clinton. Her rather consistent 2%-3% polling advantage in 2016 went up in flames once the aforementioned chimed in on Election Day.

Heideman writes that “The Democratic establishment in Wisconsin can hardly be thrilled that they were only able to defeat a novice candidate like Hong by the skin of their teeth. But the focus on polling obscures all of this.”

And his passage obscures this: While Hong’s campaign endured for 327 days, Crowley, who had suspended his, then stumped the trail for only 24 days. Yet even that narrow frame was sufficient to persuade the above 34%.

2. Subcultural leftism hurts socialists.

How peachy can a two-word euphemism be? As peachy as “subcultural leftism.” Disrobed, it means staggering stupidiities.

“It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that [Hong],” says Heideman, “could have accomplished much more if she hadn’t had to carry the load of past statements she made exemplifying insular leftist subcultures.” Uh, yeah, which is why in politics there’s a thing called vetting. About that, ask the early endorsers of one Graham Platner.

Heideman does valiantly earn, however, the priceless Understatement of the Week Award: “It’s at least plausible that all this” — i.e., subprefrontal cortex activity — “cost her the race.”

3. Socialists need to be able to make the case they’ll defeat Republicans.

Well, now that is rather the point of it all, is it not? Indeed, has that not always been the case? Not to the good folks at the Jacobin. “It should have been clear after Joe Biden’s victory over Bernie Sanders in 2020 that [winning] general elections is nonnegotiable for Democratic primary voters,” observes Heideman. Note “should have been clear.” In sum, throngs of “progressives” still haven’t grasped it.

4. Campaign on what matters to voters.

Even though that is stunningly self-evident as a campaign “strategy,” way too many lefties somehow overlook what is, quite possibly, the supreme argument made in Saul Alinsky’s leftist Bible, Rules for Radicals —

For every pol there is potentially a winning campaign on matters of highest local interest to voters. In other words, pols must conform to their district’s electorate; royal blue messaging is but cattle poop on purple ground.

Oh, and by the way, no matter how often a candidate attempts such an emphasis, it ain’t gonna work if he or she is corralled into answering endless questions about on-the-record staggering stupidities.

5. The space for socialist politics, even outside of major cities like New York, is massive.

Heideman exalts that “Hong’s campaign showed the potential that exists for the socialist left in purple states.” He omits that she lost in Wisconsin’s rural areas.

I agree with the columnist about such “space” — someday. For now, it seems to me, democratic socialism must confine itself to a “conceptual long game,” as worded in the opening paragraph. It’s been doing so, successfully, since 1933. Incrementalism is a haul, a real drag, I know. But revolutionary upheavals are catastrophically self-defeating.

The founder of modern progressivism, Franklin Roosevelt, understood that. And the latest iteration of progressivism, otherwise loosely characterized as democratic socialism, should learn it.

That its practitioners so consistently dismiss the empirically demonstrable is why, also in the opening, I anticipated a concluding train wreck in the Jacobin‘s “Five Takeaways.” There it was, and so it is.

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